PHILOTHEE data base

 The Protection of the Institute’s History: PHILOTHEE data base.

To keep all the information we collect on objects placed on deposit, and to assure the future our adventure using the new technologies we have developed a specific database to receive and make available in Moulins all our research on the history of the Order of the Visitation.

This database contains, among other information, biographies of more than 14,500 people, including 12 000 nuns, whose names come out of oblivion and or dusty archives. This work also relates to the benefactors, chaplains and each superior, but also of bishops who have receive these communities.

For each of the 356 communities of the order, even ephemeral, we have listed the dates and locations of foundation or transfers, but also the full list of the superiors, which represents more than 21,000 elections. The relations between the monasteries themselves are reflected through the foundation or also through sisters who went to an other monastery in order to be elected as superior.

We host in the Museum of the Visitation an inexhaustible source of information for researchers and academics, but also for passionate people or the curious history, based on more than 1800 books or achives pieces. The high interest of this database has given us the idea of his Christian name: Philothea.

In addition to its semantics Salesian (Philothea is the interlocutor of St. Francois de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life), this first name is an french acronym of the first letters of the sentence that summarizes its contents: Patrimoine (Heritage), History, Inventaire de l’Ordre (Inventory of the Order) and visitandin Themes.